Hi,
I realize UIs are the third rail of QEMU development, but over the years I've
gotten a lot of feedback from users about our UI. I think everyone struggles
with the SDL interface and its lack of discoverability but it's worse than I
think most people realize for users that rely on accessibility tools.
The two pieces of feedback I've gotten the most re: accessibility are the lack
of QEMU's enablement for screen readers and the lack of configurable
accelerators.
Since we render our own terminal using a fixed sized font, we don't respect
system font settings which means we ignore if the user has configured large
print.
We also don't integrate at all with screen readers which means that for blind
users, the virtual consoles may as well not even exist.
We also don't allow any type of configuration of accelerators. For users with
limited dexterity (this is actually more common than you would think), they may
use an input device that only inputs one key at a time. Holding down two keys
at once is not possible for these users.
These are solved problems though and while we could reinvent all of this
ourselves with SDL, we would be crazy if we did. Modern toolkits, like GTK,
solve these problems.
By using GTK, we can leverage VteTerminal for screen reader integration and font
configuration. We can also use GTK's accelerator support to make accelerators
configurable (Gnome provides a global accelerator configuration interface).
I'm not attempting to make a pretty desktop virtualization UI. Maybe we'll go
there eventually but that's not what this series is about.
This is just attempting to use a richer toolkit such that we can enable basic
accessibility support. As a consequence, the UI is much more usable even for a
user without accessibility requirements so it's a win-win.